Good news for all fans of the desktop lightweight Xfce. The upcoming major release, which is to be called Xfce 4.20 and is currently being developed as Xfce 4.19, will receive full support for the free Wayland display server protocol, after Xfce 4.18 had already taken the first steps in this direction.
< h2 class="text-width text-h2" id="section_xfce_is_heading_to_wayland">Xfce is heading to Wayland
After the resource-saving Xfce desktop with the current release, Xfce 4.18, released in December 2022, for the first time offers initial support for the free Wayland display server protocol, as work environments such as Gnome and KDE Plasma have already demonstrated, Xfce 4.20 is to be released for the first time full support of the Wayland protocol.
In addition to the libxfce4windowing library, the developers are currently working on the xfce4-panel API, which is responsible for the Xfce panel. fully ported to Wayland.
The most important innovations that are currently being incorporated into the Xfce 4.19 developer version relate in particular to the following in-house applications and components:
- Thunar
- Xfce4-Dict
- Xfce4-Panel*
- Xfce4-Terminal
- Xfce4-Taskmanager
- Xfce4-Windowing*
- Ristretto
- Catfish
- Gigolo
< li>Mousepad
*) already partly ported to Wayland.
In addition, bug fixes and code clean-ups to improve the taskbar, window menus, clock and other components are currently being incorporated into Xfce 4.19.
Xfce 4.20 is being developed developed as Xfce 4.19
The corresponding packages for Xfce 4.19 are already available for Arch Linux and can be compiled accordingly. However, since this is still a very early stage of development and Xfce 4.20 will not be released before the end of 2024, the preview version of the desktop is only of interest to developers and particularly experienced users for the time being.
More information can be found on the project page on the GitLab developer platform.
The “LinuxScoop” YouTube channel, which specializes in Linux and open source, demonstrates how adaptable the resource-saving Xfce desktop is.
Recommended external content 
At this point there is external content from YouTube that complements the article and recommended by the editors. It can be loaded and hidden again with one click.
Load YouTube embeds I consent to YouTube embeds being loaded. In doing so, personal data can be transmitted to YouTube. More on this in the data protection declaration.
Load YouTube Embeds Privacy Policy